This study developed a two-dimensional framework to examine the performance of creative thinking of general middle school students in solving literacy-oriented problems of symbol operations with unknown variables. The first dimension is the mathematics process, including formulate, employ, and interpret. The second dimension contains three indicators of creative thinking: fluency, flexibility, and originality. This study adopts purposive sampling, and a total of 210 students from 8th grade students in 32 classes from 4 schools in Taiwan were randomly selected to participate in the study. This study uses a questionnaire survey method. Open-ended questions are designed based on real-life situations. The questions are designed to stimulate students´ creative thinking, and each question can have infinite possible appropriate answers. The results showed that in the process of formulate, employ, and interpret, the performance of students in each process decreased in the order of fluency, flexibility, and originality. For fluency, there was little difference in students´ performance across mathematics processes. For flexibility, students performed best in the interpret process. For originality, students performed best in the formulate process. The study also found that when students were encouraged to come up with highly differentiated and unique answers, many students demonstrated excellent creative thinking skills in combining elements to produce new products, providing novel answers that far exceeded expectations. innovative answers that far exceeded expectations.
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Middle School Students’ Performance in Creative Thinking of the Literacy-oriented Mathematical Symbolic Operations
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